Affordable ways to do a reasonably professional looking mailing list

lykwydchykyn

lykwydchykyn

New member
I'm sure many of you guys have mailing lists for your bands; I wanted to get one going for my review site, lovelabormusic. In the old days I used to use Yahoogroups (or when it was egroups before that, when they didn't stick ads in everything), but that looks so cheesy anymore, with the ads and with people having to join yahoo and all. Even though I'm a computer tech I'm kind of a hack when it comes to this webmaster thing, is there a relatively cheap way to manage a mailing list, without just sending out a BCC email? How do the pros do it?
 
It's easy to do with PHP and either a database or a text file to hold the subscriber's info.
 
AlChuck said:
It's easy to do with PHP and either a database or a text file to hold the subscriber's info.
Click to expand...

Ok... can you elaborate? When I send the mail am I still BCC'ing it, or are there PHP apps to deal directly with the SMTP server?
 
Don't forget, Only mail to those who really entered their adress!

Really, maybe it is a bit out of the issue, but there's nothing worse than pissing ppl off with unwanted mails.
 
What I do with my mailing list is, I have a sign-up page on my website. People fill out a form, basically their name and email address, and after passing some reality-checking (I test the basic syntax and whether the domain name they entered is real or not), the info gets stashed in a MySQL database.

When I want to send an email to my list I have another web form. I write the message and when I click the button, it simply creates an email for each person in the database, and has the mail server send them off. So each person gets an email with only their address in the header. The PHP command is simply

mail("$address", "$subject", "$body", "$from_address");

One could just as well have the mail sent with one call to the mail function and a string of all the addresses in the BCC field, but I don't think there's any advantage to doing that...
 
Shakuan said:
There is no bad publicity my friend ;)
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I disagree on that one when it comes to mailing.


If a band or artist bothers me a few times, unwanted, with 'small' uninteresting news (I am writing new song blablabla or something) I don't open the mail adress again, or maybe I just block it. So i won't see it if maybe it's next mail was a really important news regarding the artist.

Be spare with mails or ppl will ignore you.
 
I think it's also important to try to make it as relevant as possible to the audience. There maybe no point in telling someone about a couple of shows in bars coming up if they live 400 miles away from the venues (that's a LONG way here in the UK)!!

A solution is to break down the mail list into geographic locations and tailor some of the content accordingly.
 
Ok, I'm not trying to spam people here. I did mention that I wanted something professional, didn't I? Nothing professional about spam. I'm just trying to get a standard mailing list, update people on site news, etc. Please don't hijack this thread with some moral debate on spam. Spam sucks. We all know it, That's not what I'm asking about here.

Although I'm trying to learn more about php, I really don't have a handle on it enough yet to slap together my own mailing list software. Is there a software package out there that can handle this or some other service?

ps... just found out my server does not have mail support for php. So that's out.
 
lykwydchykyn said:
I'm sure many of you guys have mailing lists for your bands; I wanted to get one going for my review site, lovelabormusic. In the old days I used to use Yahoogroups (or when it was egroups before that, when they didn't stick ads in everything), but that looks so cheesy anymore, with the ads and with people having to join yahoo and all. Even though I'm a computer tech I'm kind of a hack when it comes to this webmaster thing, is there a relatively cheap way to manage a mailing list, without just sending out a BCC email? How do the pros do it?
Click to expand...

This might do the trick....
http://www.list.org/
 
what did you end up doing "lykwydchykyn"?

I'm in a similar position with trying to create and manage a mailing list for a friends band...
 
hiphopsupamix said:
what did you end up doing "lykwydchykyn"?

I'm in a similar position with trying to create and manage a mailing list for a friends band...
Click to expand...

Well, I found out my web host doesn't support php mailing so I gave up for now... :(

Actually, I just want to get my site more built up and in order before putting a mailing list together.
 
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